The gods offer no rewards for intellect. There was never one yet that showed any interest in it. --Mark Twain

October 06, 2014

"What I have said about segregation goes double this day...and what I have said to or about some federal judges goes TRIPLE this day…" George Wallace, 1963

"Today, this tyranny is imposed by the central government which claims the right to rule over our lives under sanction of the omnipotent black-robed despots who sit on the bench of the United States Supreme Court." George Wallace, 1964

"We come here today in deference to the memory of those stalwart patriots who on July 4, 1776, pledged their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor to establish and defend the proposition that governments are created by the people, empowered by the people, derive their just powers from the consent of the people, and must forever remain subservient to the will of the people." George Wallace, 1964

I could keep piling quotes on top of quotes from the segregationist governor of Alabama, but it seems a bit tedious. Just know that Wallace was defending segregation over against federal judges who ordered integration, and know that it was in the context of his famous "Segregation now, segregation forever" ideology, and also know that Oklahoma's governor, Ms. Mary Fallin, used similar language in her official statement today denouncing SCOTUS's decision not to hear Oklahoma's (and other states') appeal to federal judges' rulings that same-sex marriage bans are unconstititutional.

Our governor said, "The people of Oklahoma have the right to determine how marriage is defined. In 2004, Oklahomans exercised that right, voting by a margin of 3-1 to define marriage as the union of one man and one woman.

“The will of the people has now been overridden by unelected federal justices, accountable to no one. That is both undemocratic and a violation of states' rights. Rather than allowing states to make their own policies that reflect the values and views of their residents, federal judges have inserted themselves into a state issue to pursue their own agendas.

“Today's decision has been cast by the media as a victory for gay rights. What has been ignored, however, is the right of Oklahomans – and Americans in every state – to write their own laws and govern themselves as they see fit. Those rights have once again been trampled by an arrogant, out-of -control federal government that wants to substitute Oklahoma values with Washington, D.C. values.”

One paragaraph at a time should be perfect. The governor will need to show where the people of a particular state have the "right" to define words as they see fit. Not sure Jefferson and Madison had this in mind, but it surely misses a larger point that the definition of words in legislation affects real people, not political abstractions. Also, I'm pretty sure the governor would find the demand that she justify "one man, one woman," rather onerous, if not impossible, given that polygamy has coexisted with monogamy for millenia. Likely, she would reference Genesis and Jesus, but she would surely not want to dig too deep into the text of either tradition, as the words of Jesus would expose her entire administration to charges of hostility toward Christian principles and ethics. That she lacks subltety and critical thinking skills does not surprise me. She is saying what she is told to say. How else to explain words that any intelligent person would recognize as utter nonsense?

The will of the people cannot be construed to mean that the people may pass any legislation they wish. Governor Wallace agreed with our governor on this point. It seemed tyrannical to him that federal judges would override the will of the people (and not all the people, obviously) to have segregation as the law of the land in Alabama. Now we have a governor in Oklahoma who would like prejudice and bigotry to be the law of the land, because 75 percent of Oklahomans believe they are somehow endowed by their creator to vote away rights of minority communities. The majority may not vote for unconstitutional laws. That is surely an axiom of representative government in the republican tradition (and please note the lower case r). The "agenda" of these federal judges seems to be justice for all, even people with whom our governor disagrees, and would someone kindly inform our governor that Governor Wallace also argued for "states' rights." All politicians who have pined for the days of Dixie have argued for states' rights. It is practically shorthand for racist propaganda meant to shore up white hegemony. Our governor is either ignorant of history or simply saying what she's told to say. Or both. (Pick C!)

No one in America has the right to govern themselves "as they see fit." Our governor is deeply dishonest, willfully ignorant, intellectually challenged, or just saying what she is told. Or all of the above. (You know which one to pick.) We must govern ourselves according to constitutional principles, and the U.S. Constitution takes precedence over the Oklahoma Constitution. The governor is playing to her base, and it is an aging, bigoted, willfully ignorant base, largely characterized by allegiance to gods who are unavailable to substantiate the claims of their followers, by persistent belief in the theocratic roots of America in spite of all evidence to the contrary, by fear of change and the other, and by privilege distress at the thought of the formerly outsiders being insiders.

Governor Fallin's base has seen their heyday. Many of them are within days, weeks, months, scant years of dying. As they have been hostile to justice all along, I can't see this as a bad thing. Perhaps they will go meet Jesus or some other god they serve in peace. Perhaps, if there is a god, these people will finally understand that justice is for all, not just the ruling class or ruling race or ruling religion. One hopes that Governor Fallin has seen her political heyday, too.

October 02, 2014

We had a beheading in Oklahoma. I am tempted to repeat that, because beheadings on Game of Thrones make perfect sense, and beheadings in countries thousands of miles from us have the feel of irrelevance in terms of our day to day lives, unless our loved one is serving in one of those countries, but even then, it's a distant echo of a fear compared to what people living in proximity to groups like ISIS must feel.

Our beheading was at a food distribution center in Moore, as if Moore hasn't had quite enough tragedy in the past few years. Alton Nolen, the murderer in question, was a recently-fired employee of the center, and he attacked two women. His brief rampage was cut short by an off-duty deputy who shot him.

Had this been a typical act of workplace violence (and how awful that the phrase is in our lexicon), people outside of Oklahoma would likely not have heard about it, as mass killings involving less than a half dozen victims rarely earn more than a cursory mention on national news anymore. A beheading, however, especially given the current international context, meant that it would absolutely make the news everywhere.

Nolen, it seems, recently converted to Islam, according to coworkers and his Facebook account, but the Muslim community in Oklahoma City was blissfully unaware of the newest member of their extended flock, and for good reason. Since the news was released that Nolen, who was released from prison in 2013, converted, locals assumed the beheading was related to Islam, and so when the FBI ruled the horrific murder an act of workplace violence and not a hate crime or domestic terrorism, conservatives howled about conspiracies and liberals and political correctness. Accuracy is always less important than ideology to a certain segment of American news consumers.

I would quote a few, select examples from local news sites, but I have found that reading comments on news websites makes me despair for humanity's future even as it encourages my desire to head up the American Committee on Eugenics. Never has a public square been more relentlessly and willfully ignorant. Truth is suffocating on the Internet from the crush of screeds and stupidity.

I would like to advance an idea that I have written about before and talked about at length with students. Unfortunately, Americans are enculturated in ways and in favor of presuppositions that make them resistant to this idea. Self-determination is built into the mythos of America, and while I am typically a proponent of the idea of letting fellow humans self-identify as to their metaphysical allegiances, we have reached a point both in this country and internationally where that is no longer a reasonable idea.

In other words, just because you call yourself something, it does not mean you are that thing. As a journalist, this is a difficult doctrine to sell, as we are supposed to report not judge, but journalists occasionally need to judge. As Americans, we are resistant to the idea of judging others' religious identification, so much so that a specific mantra is well-known and frequently invoked: "That's between her and God." Ah, yes, as if God is a ready witness in times of confusion.

Alas, gods are not available to verify your self-identification, thus the fourth commandment for Jews and Christians: you shall not take the Lord's name in vain. I know your mom told you that meant don't say, "Goddamn," or use "Jesus" like a swear word, but really, she was wrong about that. It means not to do things in the name of God that are contrary to the character of God, like underpay hookers, fail to tip your server, or behead people.

And so to the issue at hand—Mr. Nolen, the erstwhile Christian and convict turned Muslim, of a sort. Should he be allowed to call himself a Muslim, and should his act of unbelievable savagery be credited to his nascent Muslim faith? ISIS is beheading journalists much like Al Qaeda beheaded journalist Daniel Pearl in 2002. Somehow, beheading has become associated with "Muslim terrorists" or "militant Islam." Therefore, it makes perfect sense that Nolen, who recently converted to Islam, was only engaging in terrorist behavior based on his Islamic faith when he beheaded his victim, a woman he apparently did not know, but who was unfortunate enough to be near the front of the building. Nothing says "jihad" like random victims, because, really, how else do you advance the cause of your God but by choosing people who have done nothing to offend your or your God?

A pretty good analogy that compares Christianity to Islam in terms of a heinous crime would be sexual crimes versus beheading. The Catholic Church is deeply embroiled in a child sex abuse scandal. While there may be the occasional person who associates the priesthood with molesting children, there is only the rare, deranged cynic who assumes all Christians are child abusers, or that child rape is endemic to Christianity, this in spite of the remarkable numbers of pastors, priests, youth pastors, camp counselors, etc., who regularly abuse children and teens.

And what of Dennis Rader, the BTK killer, who tortured and murdered ten people, all while being a member in good standing of a Lutheran Church? Is he typical of Christianity? An absolute giveaway that people aren't practicing Christianity is the judging of one's tribe by one standard while judging an opposing tribe by a different standard. Please recall Silly Jesus and his words in Matthew 7: you will be judged with whatever measure you use to judge. If Muslims are guilty because a lunatic beheads a woman and calls himself Muslim, then Christians are guilty because a pervert molests a child while calling himself priest, or a psychopath tortures and kills people while calling himself a Lutheran. (I need not even mention Eric Rudolph.)

We are at the point where people need to demonstrate their affiliation with a faith. For Muslims, submission to Allah, which means not killing innocent people, and in the case of ISIS, not killing fellow Muslims. For Christians, loving their enemies, including their real enemies, and I'm pretty sure that love precludes using drones to bomb remote locations. There is a longer list, but you get the point. Self-identification is no longer tenable. It only confuses the categories and makes faith impossible to define.

I'm willing to let faiths define their core principles, but I insist that practitioners abide by them in order to identify as that tribe, not interpret verses in such a way that they betray their core principles. If you want to be a pragmatist, by all means, be a pragmatist, but please stop hijacking gods' voices to substantiate your pragmatism.

As for the terrorism angle. The Cleveland Count District Attorney made the announcement yesterday that there are no Oklahoma statutes specifically addressing terrorism. Other than the Murrah bombing, we haven't had an act of terrorism in this state within my lifetime, unless you count racial violence, which white conservatives are terribly reluctant to do. Remember when they insisted we didn't need hate crime legislation because "there are already statutes on the books to address assault and murder." That sounds strangely familiar, except they aren't saying that this time. They are insisting that this horrific murder be treated as an act of domestic terrorism.

Why? It is impossible to avoid the obvious issues here: he is African American and a recent convert to Islam. In Oklahoma, it is safe to assume that a white male who recently converted to Christianity and subsequently murdered someone while singing Lord, I Lift Your Name on High would be treated as an insane person, not a Christian terrorist. I cannot imagine a single evangelical or fundamentalist in this state even putting the two words together, but they do it very cavalierly for Muslim terrorist and see no disconnect.

This is largely because the presence of a so-called Muslim terrorist in Oklahoma, even a homegrown one who had converted, would validate a fear-based, political worldview that many conservatives espouse, and quite likely, really believe. This is not to say that they wanted this to happen, only to point out that a terrorist who is also Muslim in the heartland gives a face to all the non-specific fears, xenophobia, and latent racism contained in the anti-Obama narratives that still have currency in many sectors of conservatism, including in a state as deeply rooted in civil religion as Oklahoma. They need Nolen to be a terrorist because that would substantiate their "be afraid, be very afraid" mentality, while also providing material for the "Obama cannot keep us safe" narrative. They also need Nolen to be a terrorist because it reinforces their prejudice against a faith they have not even tried to understand, but one they have allowed the most egregiously dishonest of faux journalists to define, not the actual practitioners of the faith. Say what you want about the American tendency toward fair-mindedness, but it's in a PVS in the American Right.

That a Christian cannot be a terrorist in their minds but a Muslim can is a by-product of their misunderstanding (to be generous) or misrepresentation (to be less generous) of Islam. Also, it's a function of allowing people, even the most deranged and murderous among us, to self-identify with no regard to what the sacred texts and doctrines actually say. Calling the beheading an act of religious terrorism does as much disservice to a billion peaceful Muslims as calling Christianity a religion of child rape does to the two billion Christians (by their own self-identification) worldwide.

September 29, 2014

If the Satanist group that rented out a small theater at the Civic Center in Oklahoma City for a black mass recently is an indication of how pernicious evil is when it has a real face, we are all going to be just fine. To call it buffoonery might be a bit judgmental, but I am not sure what else to call a grown man in robes "casting out the Holy Spirit" in a "reverse exorcism." That hundreds of Christians arrayed in near-military looking ranks in front of the Civic Center to protest this melodramatic, low-comedy expression of one man's narcissism and anti-social personality disorder only shows that the conservative American church can't tell the difference between a bad Vincent Price impersonation and real evil.

First for the happenings inside, and then to the more interesting story outside. The press was herded into a foyer on the north side of the Civic Center. The entrance was where ticketed guests would enter when the doors opened, which is only a metaphor, as the only cop in the foyer insisted that the doors stay closed unless someone approached said doors. "All we need is one crazy to crash the doors, and we're all screwed," he said, clearly repeating lines from his screen test for "tall, white, cop-looking guy" in season nine of Criminal Minds.

The traditional velvet rope was set up to stop us from wandering down the hall to see the theater prior to the arrival of Ahriman. So, quick side note here. The Satanist group that performed (officiated? held? presented? sponsored?) the rituals that night used Zoroastrian language. Go easy on yourself if you don't know much about it, but if you are a preacher, pastor, reverend, etc., do not go easy on yourself.

The modern concepts of hell and heaven are deeply indebted to the sixth century BCE version of Zoroastrian cosmogony. Zoroaster, a Persian prophet who influenced the Hebrew captives in Babylon after the Persian conquest, preached of a dualistic universe created by the good god Ahura Mazda, who was opposed by the evil demigod Ahriman, also known as Angra Mainyu. Jewish theology had no concept of heaven and hell prior to the Babylonian captivity, but the doctrines are adopted and integrated over the centuries between 539 BCE and the life of Jesus in the first four decades of the first century CE, thanks to Zoroaster.

All that to say that Adam Daniels, the leader (Dastur, according to his preference) of the Satanists, knows far more about the origins of "satan" than the Christians who were arrayed out front, and it is Ahriman he allegedly serves. Odd as it may sound, it's almost a complete waste of words to describe the rituals. Snippets can be found online to sate curiosity, but suffice it to say it was the sum of combining a desire to be blasphemous and contrary with a too-serious self-image and a bizarre respect for theatrical, religious language, costumes, and gestures.

If you have not seen the Nicholas Cage film 8mm, I recommend avoiding it, based on the axiom that what is seen cannot be unseen (barring amnesia), but there is a helpful scene near the end in which Cage finally confronts the man who has murdered a young woman as part of a snuff film. When the killer is unmasked, he looks like one of those fat, cherubic kids whose lives in middle school are a living hell, but he confronts Cage in a way that makes perfect, horrible sense: Did you expect a monster? His version of evil is real because it's visited on the innocent, and it has a this-worldly manifestation that is unavoidable.

Daniels could play that role, easily. But his form of evil is banal, not because he is incapable of evil, but because he worships yet another deity or demigod, but his version is maltheistic instead of whitebread theism. His god is evil, but still personal, still accessible, and still active in the world—if you believe the mythology. Which is to say, it's yet another god whose existence cannot be demonstrated and whose story stretches credulity.

One ritual genuinely involved casting out the Holy Spirit. The recipient of this "ministry" was a former Catholic. Apparently the Satanists don't understand Catholic theology all that well. Only someone who was raised in some Evangelical tradition that preaches "once saved, always saved" could believe that the Holy Spirit abides in apostates, but only a fool or a drunk or a grad student argues pneumatology with a Satanist. The other ritual was the much-billed Black Mass, basically, a blasphemous version of the Catholic Mass.

Originally, the finale was to involve stomping on a consecrated host, the wafer consumed by Catholics as part of the Eucharist, what Protestants call the Lord's Supper or communion. A consecrated version means that the wafer had already been blessed and was ready for Mass, and, according to the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation, would become the actual body of Jesus at the appropriate time during the Mass. The implications of that for a Black Mass should be obvious.

Daniels managed to obtain a consecrated host through unknown means: stolen, contributed, delivered by an agent of Ahriman, or created in a clever fabrication. That the Archdiocese of Oklahoma City pursued legal remedies is a strong indication that it was a real, consecrated host. An Oklahoma judge ultimately ruled that Daniels had to return the host, and, as he told me in a phone interview, "I said, 'Fine. You can have your cracker back.'"

Losing the consecrated host meant that the Black Mass was less blasphemous, as the bread trod upon at the end of the ceremony was not the actual body of the Christ Pantokrator, but in a very non-metaphorical sense was bread, not John 6:35 bread, which is also a metaphor, unless you are Catholic, but real "you can eat it and not go to hell" bread.

Slavoj Zizek, the Slovenian philosopher, has written at length about phrases like this taken to their linguistic/logical conclusion causing "irruptions of the real," which is a moment when the lexical meaning of the term is forced into the real world and shown to be absurd. This is clearly an example of that because we are talking about bread, not magic bread or Hansel and Gretel bread, just bread. The Catholics are uncharacteristically literalists on this point, as they manage to use the Magisterium to excuse every other non-literal interpretation of Jesus' words in the corpus of Catholic doctrine and dogma.

What all the good, Christian folk arrayed out front were saying by their presence and prayers and songs and sermons was that stomping on bread is a way of summoning evil. I realize that is a bit atomistic, but this is a case of metaphysical differences creating tribes. For people like me for whom the devil is childish nonsense or a poor externalization of mythical, Jungian archetypes, we are talking about portly Vincent Price trampling bread. For others, that tribe of theists who believe the world is magical, or at least believe that myths are referentially true stories, also called histories, the buffoon was summoning the actual devil.

Theism can exist quite nicely without a personification of evil. In fact, humans seem all too capable of hurting each other without inspiration from a smooth-talking, Miltonian fallen angel to guide our perversities. I left the ministry and the faith in 2006; I stopped believing in the devil a half dozen years before that. The concept is unnecessary and answers nothing. The entirety of Genesis 3 makes more sense as a mythological explanation (etiology) for the loss of innocence in a psychological sense, expressed as a universal reality, than as a talking snake (the devil) tempting primordial humans to forsake YHWH. In other words, Satanists have less credibility than Christians, Jews, or Muslims, primarily because the Satanists' god is superfluous. Everything he does, we do without his assistance, and without his love of verbosity.

Yet, there were 400-500 people gathered outside the Civic Center that evening, and all were convinced that portly Vincent Price was summoning God's principal enemy, as if free will needs a competitor in that regard. Milton's Lucifer was correct about at least one thing: God is a dictator, and the quest for free will runs contrary to ethical monotheism. The Christians—I saw no other tribe—were arrayed out front of the Civic Center, which faces east, in clans or families within the larger tribe.

Catholics were a full sixty percent of the crowd, including a group of approximately 300 members of TFP, a group that needs a bit of an introduction. The group was founded in Brazil in 1960 by Plinio Correa de Oliveira. The abbreviation stands for Tradition, Family, and Property, or, as I prefer to call it, the Holy Trinity of Missing the Point. You will spend many hours scouring the New Testament for Jesus' teachings on personal property. You will find a brief reference like this: "The Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head..." Don't let that trouble you, though. Jesus was definitely a fan of John Locke, because he foreknew Locke's idea of life, liberty, and property, which was changed in our Constitution to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

TFP is the group that got the Black Mass canceled at Harvard, and so they bussed 300 of the faithful here to prevent the Oklahoma City version, even as our beloved governor, just like a broken clock, was right this time when she refused to stop the event, even though she tried to find a "legal" way to stop it. Let's be clear: conservatives are way more concerned about tradition than they are about law. However, the Black Mass went forward, even with 300 TFP members out front, dressed conservatively and sporting red sashes with a gold lion pin emblematic of, as one idealistic teenager told me, "Our Lord, the Lion of Judah." Jesus, it seems, is always available for protests, lawn parties, and political campaigns; one only needs the name to invoke the power, prestige, or theological justification for a claim that can be conveniently tied to an all too agreeable Savior. Perhaps in his zeal to save us all, he can't say no?

To their credit, the Catholics were occupied singing hymns or praying the Rosary. They did have a dizzying display of signage, including pleas to return America to "one nation under God," and they were singing God Bless America when I arrived (not a hymn, alas), so their agenda was clearly religious in the sense of civil religion, but, again, to their credit, they were the best behaved tribe of Christians on the east side of the Civic Center, an area that is a large plaza, composed of sidewalks, benches, public art, and occasional covered areas, and toward which the entrance faces. In other words, if you walk out the east side of the Civic Center, you are facing downtown Oklahoma City, and on this day, representatives of "the Lord's Army," arrayed, squadron-style, in denominations and traditions.

To quote Jay Kelly, the plaza was a Tilt-a-Whirl and an Indian taco stand away from being the State Fair of Religion. That's a fair assessment. The plaza was a rallying point for many different squadrons of the Lord's Army. Catholics made up at least sixty percent of the crowd, but other groups were noticeable for their volume (voice, not number).

I talked to an Apostolic minister from Sapulpa, Okla., who divided his time preaching hellfire for those who cooperated with Satan and speaking (yelling) in tongues. His name was Albert, and after I coaxed him down from his park bench-soapbox-pulpit, he was soft-spoken and kind. He was there to explain the error of the Satanists' ways; he simply thought loud and histrionic was more effective than kind and gentle. He immediately started yelling his sermon as soon as we stopped the interview.

A group of young, African American men, sporting combat boots and dressed in purple and gold vestments emblazoned with "Israel United in Christ," held down the southwest corner of the plaza, and posed back to back, as if they were fighting a last stand, a la Thermopylae, while they shouted Bible verses, the gist of which was that Jesus came to redeem Israel. Israel, according to their understanding and proclamation, was composed of people of color, I assume. Of course. History be damned. Real Jews are black. Everyone knows that.

A Pentecostal congregation squatted on the northwest corner of the plaza. Their pastor preached and prayed in a Thulsa Doom-worthy voice about the fate of Satanists and all who cooperated with Satan. The congregation, variously sitting, kneeling, and standing with hands raised, prayed in English and "tongues of angels."

They were perched next to the TFP Catholics who composed the middle of the phalanx, if we are to extend the military metaphor. Behind the phalanx were various other sub-tribes, including independent fundamentalists and evangelicals. Even farther back were singles and couples who were praying quietly in out-of-the-way places, much like Jesus would have commended, it seems.

Two circumstances made the night more remarkable than it would have been otherwise. The first was a growing realization amongst the fundamentalists that the majority of the protesters were Catholic. The fundamentalists had been directing their invective at the Satanists for most of the evening. A few intrepid evangelists camped at the edge of the police line on the north side of the building—the cops blocked the north street to allow press and Satanists to enter unmolested. The evangelists had bullhorns, and they used them to direct a constant flow of sermon, prayer, and mockery at the Satanists on the north side of the building. In fact, most of the group gathered on that side was composed of a metal band that Daniels had booked for the show and then subsequently ignored, even as the band pleaded for a brief audience with the Vicar of Ahriman.

The bullhorns broadcasted the evangelists' displeasure with the blasphemers in various ways, including, "Shame on you for sneaking in the back door! You hide from the truth! Cowards!" The police and staff at the Civic Center had developed the logistics to avoid a confrontation, but the fundamentalist ministers were not going to let reality impinge on their sermons, and yes, this is only one instantiation of that pattern. Once the bullhorn bearers realized that their words were wasted, they found a new target: Catholics.

Yes, the fundamentalists posted up in front of the TFP group and began to mock/proselytize the Catholics. One of the evangelists held forth on the differences between soteriology in the Catholic framework and the "correct" one, which is to say some version of Protestantism, especially faux-literalist, fundamentalist Baptist. Apparently, their failure to use imprecatory prayers to stop the Black Mass left them no recourse but to save the Papists from false salvation, which is to say, trusting in works as opposed to faith. I want to use the term shitshow, but it's not really a word, so I'll just mention that the worst offender directed his efforts at clean-cut Catholic teens, all of whom maintained their composure in the face of egregious douchebaggery. As Mark Twain said, "God is better than his reputation," and this preacher buttressed the truth of that assertion.

Finally, the gathered tribes were treated to one of God's signs shortly after the reverse exorcism began. It had rained just enough to soil clean cars right before the event, and because science is more consistent in its predictability than theism, a rainbow appeared above downtown Oklahoma City. People in the crowd sighed expansively and took pics of the amazing phenomenon. A rainbow! During a Black Mass! What could it mean? Albert, the heavenly polyglot, was near me when it appeared.

"Do you know what that means?" He yelled, undisguised joy in his expression.

I took the high road. "That's God's covenant with Noah," I said,

He slapped me on the back, and said, "That's right, brother!" He moved off toward the east, praying in tongues, hands and Bible aloft.

I would have received no reward for saying, "According to the text, it simply means YHWH won't flood the world again. There is no guarantee against destruction by fire, wind, virus, bacteria, rabid wombats, or the herp."

There is no cure for pareidolia, the tendency to see patterns in random stimuli. People find signs where and in ways that suit their narrative. The rainbow reassured the faithful army that God was there and on their side. The rainbow was located above downtown, though. It could have easily been a sign that God likes portly Vincent Price and his stab at being evil. It could also have been an effect based on light refracted through water, but who knows? God works in mysterious ways, his bread to transform.

August 19, 2014

When I was in grad school, our instructor forced us to slog through all 368 pages of Hans Frei's labyrinthine, grammatically-irritating study in hermeneutics called The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative. We had only a few days to read it, but a few weeks probably wouldn't have helped a whole lot. German philosophers and theologians can't write. At all. Surely there is a correlation between a language that just crams nouns together, not portmanteau style, but rather like compound words, and in such a way that there is no reasonable limit to how many nouns can be conjoined so as to form more complex or specific nouns and to a writing style that is so complex and circuitous related to the actual point that the reader is often left wondering if she took the wrong exit.

Frei's rather dense prose hid a very simple (to understand) thesis: Christians have not allowed the Biblical narrative to shape them because they have not inhabited the narrative. Instead, the narrative has been eclipsed by competing narratives, all vying for the designation of primary metanarrative. Yes, I'm going to unpack all this, and trust me, I just made Frei really simple. You're welcome.

Evangelicals are not likely to embrace Frei because his thesis does not require that the narrative be referentially true, but his thesis is the only hope for evangelicals and fundamentalists to embody a particular ethic, and that ethic is the only hope they have for witness. That right there is everything I learned in grad school distilled down to something pretty damn simple. That it is problematic only highlights Frei's thesis.

To inhabit a narrative, you have to believe that the narrative somehow has power to actually shape your life. For you non-theists, that is not magic talk. It simply means that to allow a narrative to shape your life only requires the embodiment of ideals extracted from the narrative, and by extension, the demand that hermeneutics be done with an eye toward ethical embodiment. The Bible itself presents competing narratives in the tradition of midrash, but Christians at least agree the narrative leads somewhere, such that there is a metanarrative contained within the text, somewhere, even as it is demonstrably clear, except to fundamentalists who hold to inerrancy, that the entire text cannot be the metanarrative.

The postliberal tradition offered the idea of a lens through which to view biblical hermeneutic. There are times when Jesus, Moses, Paul, and James cannot be right at the same time. In those moments, what lens do you use to decipher the text. That lens will determine your narrative arc, and ultimately, how and if the narrative shapes you. While this will, again, be problematic for fundamentalists and evangelicals, there really is no other way to read the Bible if coherence and logic actually matter and are not themselves eclipsed by an artificially literalist reading of the text. Frei did not mean that the inhabiting of the narrative would create an unreal world or necessitated the reader project literalist categories onto her experience of reality. Rather, the narrative is to shape people into a certain kind of person, specifically, those who are redeemed by God for the purpose of embodying an ethic that is contrary, not to reality, but to the principalities and powers that, for now, have power in the world, including racial, political, and religious hegemonies.

The eschatological reality of redemption is not deferred to the eschaton; rather, the redeemed live the eschatological reality of resurrection right now. The narrative informs the ethical imperatives, and, if Jesus is to be taken seriously, overcomes the fear of violence and death, because Jesus has overcome death on behalf of all with benefits that extend to all, such that an ethic that puts the believer at odds with the powers and principalities may lead to death, but death does not get the last word. This is the soteriological significance of the narrative, and while evangelicals may readily agree to the soteriological aspect, it is the political aspect shaped by the ethical imperatives that will be most troublesome.

The events in Ferguson offer a perfect panopticon of the weakness of current evangelical and fundamentalist narratives to shape ethical imperatives related to politics, not in the governmental sense, but according to a more expansive understanding of the term, to wit, that politics is the science of getting along with others in the world, and for people of moral conscience, the imperative to live redemptively. What I find to be universally true at times like this is that for many, many white, religio-political conservatives, the political narrative has eclipsed the religious narrative, and in such a way that the same group tries to read back their political narrative as non-religious, as if such a thing is even possible.

Religion, even Christianity, is political, but the politics of Jesus don't look like the politics of America's religio-political conservatives, and somehow, they have never noticed. You cannot promulgate a political narrative scrubbed of religious significance; such a thing does not exist if you are a person of faith. In the same fashion, you cannot promulgate a religious narrative that has no political implications; this thing, too, does not exist. The modern lie of conservative politics and conservative evangelicalism is that both are possible.

The narrative arc of the African American churches in the U.S. has been toward justice. Dr. King spoke eloquently of the arc of the universe bending toward justice; he would have preached similar themes and heard similar sermons many times growing up in church. The narrative was shaped by slavery, Jim Crow, lynching, ghettoization, segregation, and the manifold ways white culture reinforced their hegemony using police, legislation, terrorism, and the pulpit. The narrative arc of the white churches in the U.S. has tended toward morality, or a cynic might say, maintaining cultural control. This partially explains the inability of white evangelicals and fundamentalists to empathize with the protestors in Ferguson. Rather, they cling to whatever "news" emerges from white conservative blogs or FoxNews in hopes of discrediting a people they don't even pretend to try to understand. The narrative shapes us all, but our experience of the same place on earth can be radically different.

That the white churches have never noticed is related to the weakness of their narrative to shape ethical imperatives across a broad spectrum of human institutions, desires, and systems. Evangelical and fundamentalist narratives eclipse the biblical narrative by offering a competing narrative of culturally appropriate behavior (morality) or, quite possibly worse, a "gospel" of individual salvation. One need not disbelieve in individual salvation to agree that the atomistic approach to the Bible has resulted in the loss of a robust witness based on ethics, not on the sharing of testimonies or the "truth of the Gospel."

Somehow, the American evangelical church has come to believe that Jesus was deeply, profoundly wrong in his insistence that adherence to the gospel would lead to death. Rather than treat his words literally—the irony, too, is profound—they make of them a metaphor of discipleship, as if discipleship is something other than the possibility of death as a result of embodying an ethic that will stir up the principalities and powers. The new "cross," is the willful surrender of appetites or desires, or getting up early to read the Bible, or preserving virginity until marriage, or giving ten percent, or choosing unpopular cultural positions, or... The list is almost never-ending, but the cross is never the instrument of death that Jesus endured because of his brazen disregard for the principalities and powers. Rather, it is a construct that allows me to be Christian without risking anything other than disapproval or the loss of an orgasm or two, and it will apparently never lead me to empathize with brothers and sisters of a different race whose experience of this country is radically different than my own.

August 07, 2014

I had lunch with another reverend today, not the Reverend of record, mind you, but another remarkably bright pastor committed to a tradition and a place, in this case a Holiness tradition that I'll leave unnamed for now. We were discussing the idea of a non-material Christianity, which is to say, the ability for people like myself to practice redeeming the world without being beholden to a particular narrative. Four and a half years ago, I wrote this little parable because I was frustrated at the lack of cooperation between theists and non-theists, primarily from the resistance generated by theists. Many seemed more concerned with a form of theism tied to a particular narrative than in actually repairing the world.

I understand that much of fundangelical theology is not concerned with repairing the world; instead, they opt for a wait until the end approach to eschatology that is borderline triumphalist and despondent at the same time. "We can't fix it, but Jesus will really fix it when He comes back." It is this sort of despondency that gets a full critique in Dallas Willard's Divine Conspiracy, and now, even more so, in the continuation of that work, co-authored after Willard's death by Gary Black, Jr., The Divine Conspiracy Continued: Fullfilling God's Kingdom on Earth.

I read Willard "religiously" as a young minister, but it wasn't the theology that attracted me to him. Rather, it was his role as professor of philosophy at the University of Southern California, an unapologeticaly secular school, that helped me choose to pursue my love of philosophy. Willard's thesis in the first Divine Conspiracy was that "God's 'divine conspiracy' is to overcome the human kingdoms of this world with love, justice, and truth." It's clearly more detailed than that, and for my non-theist friends, it is not a theocratic call to arms. Willard was no theocrat, and though I have zero experience of Black, I assume if he and Willard were friends, he is no theocrat either.

The thesis behind the new work is that this divine conspiracy must be carried out by (unfortunately) Christian leaders. I say unfortunately because the task of healing the world need not be limited to one sect of theists, but I don't fault the authors for extending their own narrative into additional arenas of life, specifically "government, education, business or commerce, the professions, and ethics." The authors flesh out the thesis a little on the same page (34):

When leaders, spokespersons, and professionals...become organized with the critical institutions of our society to most positively influence contemporary life for the common good, blessing, goodness, and grace will flow over the land as the waters fill the seas (Hab. 2:14).

Much of the book is concerned with delineating these professions and their attendant responsibilities to help bring about God's divine conspiracy in the world, but not before the authors touch on something that the reverend and I discussed today: moral authority. Willard and Black rightly point out that leaders without moral authority cannot lead; unfortunately, the Church as a whole is flagging in the area of moral authority. Witness the recent plagiarism scandals that caused the celebrity pastors' congregations to simply shrug their shoulders. How does an institution founded on the importance of ethical witness not call leaders to account in those situations?

When the Church has been the de facto hegemony for generations in this country, identity formation ceases to be important. In fact, only the churches that work with minorities and the marginalized will develop a solid Christian identity, and as segregation and slavery taught us in the South, that identity will often be necessary in the face of the hegemonic forces of cultural Christianity so as not to be robbed of moral authority or effective witness. In short, identity formation in fundangelical circles, especially the predominantly white church, will not take place because their identity as the dominant culture combined with their inability to recognize privilege will carry them wherever they want to go, and it's a very short step to relegating ethics to textbooks so that the insitution can survive even as its witness dies a gasping, wheezing, powerless death.

Willard is at his best when discussing ethics, and the chapters on authority are worth the price of the book, especially for leaders in any field. Black mentions that Willard's class on business and professional ethics was always popular and full at USC, and that is a credit to his clarity and honesty when dicussing ethics. If the narrative you are shaping your life around does not produce practices consistent with that narrative, what use is the narrative?

On the other side of that, though, is the idea that if the narrative leads you to focus on the narrative as important above praxis, as in you insist on basic beliefs before repairing the world, then you might just as well put your narrative on a pole like the bronze serpent and worship it. Repairing the world is the task of all, not just theists, and it is at particularly this point that I have to disagree with Willard and Black. I don't care about the theological justification for tikkun olam, I care about the repairing of what is broken. The creation was good, is good, and can be good, and that requires the work of all of us.

Progressives get no pass here, either. It's no good to fashion new progressive theologies while deconstructing the text when it's convenient, and then quoting the text when useful from the other side of the coin of convenience. You are constructing a theology in midair. Why hold onto the narrative at all?

The narrative, if it's to be useful at all, must generate practices based on a particular identity, and in this case, Willard and Black at least understand that Christian narrative ought to form Christian character. That is more than the multicampus purveyors of spiritual McReligion understand, and the authors rightly call them out near the end, especially those who run their churches like a business. The "kingdom of God" is not a business, and one will look long and hard to find Jesus making any such reference to it in his parables. But if the narrative creates a special class of leaders whose task it is to bring about the kingdom, then it will miss the larger possibility that a non-material form of the same desire, which is to say those of us outside the narrative who care about redemption, can be an effective ally in the task of tikkun olam.

July 18, 2014

No one was shocked when Dallas First Baptist pastor and professional theopolitician Robert Jeffress suggested that Jesus would build a fence to keep immigrant children out of the U.S.--at least no one who tracks religion in the U.S. That a Southern Baptist pastor has aligned himself with civil religionistas is not surprising, because the SBC has become the most obvious and frequent example of alleged Christians mixing Christianity with conservative politics. It's so frequent and so egregious that I am forced to believe they have not actually read the New Testament, because the text is bookended by a "savior" executed by empire and an appeal to Christians to be faithful over against empire. That the U.S. is a prime example of current empire seems so obvious that to miss it indicates willful ignorance, intentional deceitfulness, or substandard intelligence.

I have no desire to parse the legal issues related to President Obama enforcing a law that President George W. Bush signed. In fact, the ways in which Americans regularly indulge their own confirmation biases related to politics is exhausting, and while the psychology of it is obvious to outsiders, no amount of words strung together would begin to penetrate the web of preferences and biases that shapes American political affiliations. Americans have long ago surrendered a quest for truth in favor of a quest for being right, and that has been catastrophic for the common good and civil discourse.

I am more concerned here with the ways in which "rules" of interpretation and application are applied. Jeffress is clearly guilty of an ages-old heuristic whereby Jesus can be applied as the solution to nearly any problem, and always in such a way that the speaker benefits from "what Jesus would have done or believed." While Jesus actually speaking about a particular situation, such as divorce, makes it a little more complicated but not impossible to apply the heuristic to concrete situations, Jeffress benefits from the best iteration of this technique: Jesus never spoke about immigrant children on the U.S. border, so he can be made to believe or say anything.

Jeffress is a pastor and a Christian, but his political narrative has not been formed by the Jesus of the Gospels. Outside of liberal Christians and Anabaptists, finding a tribe whose political narrative has been shaped by that Jesus has become analogous to a unicorn sighting. (This is not to say that individual Christians in various traditions are not more conscientious, but the tribe in toto is hard to find.) I'm not sure this criticism is all that damning from an "inside the tribe" perspective, quite frankly, since evangelicals and fundamentalists know and care far more about Jesus the savior than Jesus the political revolutionary, and while they shy away from politicizing Jesus in his own context, they jubilantly and zealously allow him to "comment" on modern politics. Again, the disconnect between Jesus not being presented as a political person in his own context versus the Jesus as apologetic for cherished American political positions is so egregiously dishonest that I'm left to wonder if evangelicals are oblivious, deceptive, or just not smart.

It is also entirely possible that they assume that Jesus was apolitical, but that his principles or values "speak" to current cultural and political issues. The only way that the Jesus of the Gospels can be made apolitical is if the text is intentionally read as if it is somehow separate from the political climate of Romans, Sadducees, Pharisees, and lestai (insurrectionists) of the time, a reading which ignores that Jesus was crucified along with insurrectionists and that the "King of the Jews" above his head on the cross was a charge of insurrection, not an accidental proclamation of his messiahship. This apolitical reading has done much to drain Jesus of his political aims, most of which involved freeing Israel from the Romans, a topic that is covered exhaustively for a populist audience in Reza Aslan's excellent book Zealot, and by eviscerating his political positions, he is left as an effigy that can be reified with whatever current political position requires buttressing by appeals to "God's Word."

This simplistic appropriation of Jesus clearly makes of him an idol, so they might just as well build a bust, bronze it, shove incense in his ears, and chant talking points around this neocon golden calf but for their reservations about idol worship. The inability to recognize idol worship in its obvious instantiations only further solidifies my belief that evangelicals and fundamentalists flatten the metaphors such that they can't recognize real idolatry unless it involves a statue and temple prostitutes. The rigid, contextual literalism allows them to enforce the letter of the law and ignore the spirit. How these modern exegetes don't understand straining out a gnat and swallowing a camel is also befuddling at a profound level. Again, do they actually read this text they say shapes their faith? Maybe for a few Sundays the fundangelicals should leave Paul on the shelf and pick up the Hebrew prophets so that "hearing they will hear."

Jeffress applied that heuristic to immigration, but it's used regularly by conservatives (liberals, too, quite frankly) on a number of issues about which the Bible and Jesus are clearly silent. This is made worse by the staunch refusal of fundangelicals to actually allow Jesus to speak clearly where he clearly speaks clearly: accumulation of wealth, divorce, loving enemies (not killing them with drones, for example)...just read the Sermon on the Mount, and then read how fundangelicals explain away the rather clear admonitions under the rubric of "these rules are meant to show us we must rely on God's grace to be saved." Oddly enough, Jesus delivers this list without ever using those words, but, eisegesis is the dominant rubric in fundangelical churches, especially when applying the Jesus/American politics heuristic. I'm happy to let Leighton address this in closing:

"I argue that any communication, whether text, image, or utterance, is interpreted in the context of at least one reference community. I'll go further and claim that unless 'Don't use eisegesis' is one of the community's rules of interpretation, eisegesis trumps exegesis always and everywhere. Taking social cues from people and from group dynamics is hardwired in [most of] our brains; absorbing competing information from a text is difficult by itself, and asserting that content over against a group dynamic is nigh impossible without training that rarely exists. This helps explain why Church of Christ members who read the entire bible frequently and can recite biblical text better than many professors who teach the OT and NT texts still arrive at the same anti-biblical interpretations as flag-worshippers who may only have cracked the spine of a bible two or three times in their lives."

July 05, 2014

If you want to read about the Hobby Lobby decision, I'm going to suggest you go elsewhere. I have very little to say about it until the rhetorical, hyperbolic, slippery-slope-generating dust settles. I only need to talk about the Hobby Lobby details as illustrative of a larger problem within certain forms of theism, especially American evangelicalism and fundamentalism.

A few observers have noted that the entire Hobby Lobby case rests on the conflict between science and religion, specifically the tendency to distrust science as somehow antithetical or at least hostile to faith. That topic is best covered in a different post, and I, quite frankly, have no interest in writing one about it. It is clear that the mistrust of science led to some of the stronger rhetoric, and certainly in the triumphalism evident in some circles after the decision.

To be clear, the case rested on the Green family being allowed to define pregnancy in a way that is counter to how medical professionals define pregnancy. I have no idea why I should take the word of business owners who specialize in selling imported crap for display in middle class homes around evangelicaldom when the American Medical Association seems a far more reliable source of information about medicine, but it's America, and as my students regularly inform me with scalable—depending on their level of offense at my cultural blasphemy—levels of indignation, "Everyone has a right to their own opinion."

Indeed, even if those opinions are wrong. At least once in my career I have wished that a student would test scientific opinions with real world experiments, like the theory of gravitation from the roof of the library, or energy exchanges in collisions by standing in front of a speeding truck. It's not one of my better moments, but I can only be expected to explain "scientific theory" to college students so many times before I lose patience with the systems that work against science education in this country. (Science educators, I feel your pain, and I sincerely hope that you get your own shopping-mall-sized particle collider in science heaven.) More informed writers than I have lamented at length the ways in which science education is deficient in this country, and fundangelical Christianity bears a substantial portion of the blame for this unhappy circumstance. This, however, is also not the subject of this post.

The Hobby Lobby decision is a hydra-headed clusterfuck, and we'll be sorting out the implications for a long time. That the SCOTUS majority opinion specifically said the decision could not be used for precedential purposes related to blood transfusions and other medical realities about which different faith traditions have differing beliefs is a strong indication that they know this was a perilously bad decision. Either the principle applies or it doesn't, and in this case, they treated a comprehensive application of principle as an ad hoc application of principle, but the box is still open and the five justices in the majority will be living with their decision in the form of litigation for years to come.

As for how this relates to religion and public life, my favorite topic for you newbies, this is an excellent (for illustrative purposes, I mean) example of the tendency of confusing the purpose, nature, and object of faith with a clearer task of language and a more testable version of truth. Faith, at least in a theological framework, is likely best defined as trust. Like many terms related to metaphysics, the edges of the definition are blurry, so precising definitions are always necessary in discussions of faith. Trust, I think, comes closest in a comprehensive sense.

Trust in god is the proper application of faith, and the possible permutations of that phrase, while possibly hard to quantify, at least offer a hint about the purpose and object of faith. Faith is trust directed at god, and it relies on believing things that can't be known. This is contra Reformed theology, especially Calvin, which sees faith as "firm and certain knowledge" about particular revelations that come from God and that are testified to by the Holy Spirit, whose task is to reveal them to our minds and seal them on our hearts (ugh, useless metaphor there). This is metaphysical magic talk for "we know things that there is no way to actually know."

Since I think of Reformed and neo-Reformed theology (except Barth) as synonymous with logically consistent insanity, you will forgive me for saying Calvin is explaining a reality that he can only agree to if his god is THE god. Extend that definition to Hinduism or Santeria, and he would argue that reason is the means to prove the superiority of Christianity over those other religions, and not faith as a mode of knowledge. How, after all, do you argue for the superiority of one sacred text over another without using reason, especially when both religions rely on revelation as a means to knowledge of god?

So, to the issue at hand. Faith in god does not imply the ability to define non-theological terms, like pregnancy, so that they are consistent with a particular brand of theism. The object of faith is not definitions or meanings that are only tangentially related to words in a sacred text; the object of faith is god. This will necessitate that theists believe certain things are true or false, but extracting categories from the text and then insisting testable truths be understood in light of those categories is not helpful in communicating with members of various tribes who do not share those categories. Pregnant means, for all tribes, a fertilized egg is implanted in the wall of the uterus. To equate faith with the belief in definitions that are contrary to known scientific realities is to impose an anti-intellectual burden on believers that makes meaningful, intertribal communication impossible.

June 18, 2014

Hobby Lobby made the "news" yet again when Jonathan Merritt, former SBC wunderkind and now RNS columnist and exceptional commentator, took them to task for calling themselves a "Christian company" while purchasing products from China. It's an old discussion around Oklahoma, where the behemoth is headquartered, and due in large part to the company's influence here, they tend to get a pass on buying products to sell "on sale" that were likely produced by children and/or slave labor, including people of faith who have been imprisoned for their refusal to register their churches.

The piece wasn't news per se; it was a commentary, and to his credit, Merritt asked for a critical response from Russell Moore, executive director of the Southern Baptist Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission. Moore took over last year from the serial plagiarist Richard Land, and as is the case with the highest echelons of SBC leadership, Moore is a politician more than a minister. That orientation could not be more clear from his response to Merritt. Before we get to that, though, a few words on Merritt's piece.

Just reading the comments on the RNS piece is enough to induce despair in the most happy go lucky of philosophy professors, and it reveals with a high degree of clarity that conservative fundangelicalism has reached a new low in critical engagement. Setting aside the folks who could not disengage their own biases from Merritt's piece and who gleefully indulged in ad hominem, strawman, bandwagon, and red herring fallacies, we are still left to wonder why Merritt's piece creates such controversy.

Companies are not Christian. Surely the most elementary definition of "christian" makes this clear. If we begin with the notion that a Christian is a person, we are left to marvel that anyone thinks a company possesses the necessary soulishness or imago dei to be saved by grace (or by grace and works, Catholic friends). The designation is unfortunate, and, quite frankly, sloppy. What is likely meant is that a company's owner has the right to create the value system, within the law, that the owner deems most in line with the owner's values, such that a Christian owner can make conditions of employment and human resource-related policies consistent with the owner's religious convictions.

This seems like a good idea initially. After all, the employer assumes the risks of starting and running a business, and this is America, damnit, and so she should be able to run her company the way she sees fit as long as the laws are followed. However, mixing the grammar (and vocabulary) of Christianity with the grammar (and vocabulary) of business is a horrible idea if you mean to be a Christian in any meaningful way. If you mean to be an American or a capitalist first, by all means, mix away.

What is most troubling in this part of the discussion is the idea that a "Christian company" should be treated like a religious charity or church, where non-discrimination laws are waived for very good reason (e.g., a church should not be penalized for refusing to hire a Muslim organist, etc.). A for-profit business should not receive the same protections as a religious charity or organization, primarily because they exist to make a profit, which is to say that they should not be given preferential treatment or protections just because the owner is of a particular religious persuasion. The employees of a for-profit company should be able to reasonably expect that their Constitutional rights will be respected, and that their employer will follow all applicable local, state, and federal laws. No employee should be expected to accept employment with the condition that certain provisions of the Constitution or applicable laws don't apply to them.

Additionally, the idea that companies have certain rights typically afforded to individuals is at the heart of the utterly awful Citizens United decision. That a company receives First Amendment protections related to freedom of speech in terms of political donations almost guarantees that SCOTUS will be consistent and grant that companies have protections related to the other clause: freedom of religion. For reasons that Citizens United makes obvious, this is a dangerous trend for actual individual liberties, and that people of faith are supporting rights related to the second clause while protesting the same rights related to the first only shows the shallow nature of reflection amongst certain tribes of theists. Rarely is self-interest in ethics so obvious.

So, speaking of ethics, we turn to Russell Moore and his response to Merritt. First things first: Merritt is not guilty of a red herring line of questioning. Moore only assumes so because Moore has mixed his categories. Merritt is talking about Christianity; Moore is talking about U.S. economic policy. Again, the leadership of the SBC is primarily political, not ministerial. That Moore cannot address this issue without first insisting that capitalism is the best way to handle the China problem is a key indicator that he means to defend capitalism first, followed by Christianity filtered through the lens of free market capitalism. That America has a long history of enriching tyrants and dictators at the expense of the poor and the marginalized—you know, Jesus' favorite people—is happily ignored by Moore, primarily because he is shaped by Reagan (and contextually, Nixon) more than Jesus. Call that ad hominem if you wish, but I think he condemns himself with his own response far more thoroughly than I do.

At this point, it's easy to skip a huge chunk of his response because much of it is dedicated to talking about the best way to change the politico-economic climate of China rather than addressing Merritt's actual points. Moore treats Merritt like a naive reactionary rather than like a thoughtful commentator who wonders how allegiance to Jesus ought to influence a so-called Christian company's treatment of the poor. Moore's answer: give the manufacturers and politicians more money so they'll treat laborers and peasants more equitably. Did he mean to be a textbook example of the sort of douchebaggery Marx and Engels were writing about?

Finally, Moore helpfully points out that the Christian moral tradition—you know, the singular one that he apparently inherited, not the polyvocal one that actually exists—has always distinguished between direct involvement in sin and "living in a world in which sin exists." Uh, yeah, nice, but that's not the issue, Mr. False Dichotomy. Indirect involvement in sin is a third way here, and Moore ignores it because he's too obtuse to see it or too political to be honest. (Guess which one I believe.) What Moore is saying here is that his experience of the Christian moral tradition ignores all input from the Anabaptists, Catholic social justice practitioners, African American activist/theologians like Dr. King and James Cone, and post-liberal geniuses like Walter Wink. Good to know that the Christian moral tradition is most embodied in Southern, conservative, evangelical crackers.

Finally, for the second time, is Moore aware that Baptists have historically been concerned about individuals created in the image of God? A defense of China and of companies that purchase from Chinese slaves that takes the "long view" is not a defense in the spirit of Jesus, nor is it in the Baptist tradition. Some of those individuals will be dead before (if) policies are changed. They will live and die in squalor, poverty, and slavery, and their souls will know no rest. He is defending a company that makes profits off the very people the prophets said God loves, and he is defending American economic policy that treats systems as more important than people—a sort of theological breaking eggs to make an omelette argument. Exactly which Baptist tradition is Moore speaking in defense of?

May 13, 2014

No argument against the death penalty is an argument against the victim's rights, but is instead a discussion about the merits of the punishment itself.

The phrase "deserves to die" seems to have no definable parameters, unless you count preference and assumption as parameters.

Oklahoma's recent botched execution of Clayton Lockett made national news because his death was so horrific. Some, of course, see karma or at least justice in this event. (I try in vain to explain that karma is for the next life, but Americans like the idea of instant, and so the idiotic concept abides.) I'm not interested so much in the response of Americans outside the realm of Christianity, and I'm not daft enough to actually believe that more than seventy percent of Americans are really Christian. Cut the number in half and you probably still have a generous estimate, if behavior is to have any meaning in determining religious affiliation. That roughly half of Americans support the death penalty does not surprise me. We are, after all, a culture raised on the myth of redemptive violence, and so the predictable reliance on violence to solve societal and geopolitical (and theological) ills should be as expected as our reliance on prayer, even as it also offers no obvious benefits, outside improvements in mental health if not as a curative for actual diseases.

For Christians, though, who are allegedly raised or catechized within the ethic of Christianity (as broad as that tribe's boundaries can be) the death penalty presents a test of their ethics, and it is, in almost every case, one they fail badly. Lockett presented an excellent opportunity for the flock to respond to a horrific death with some degree of horror, and yet, the title is drawn from an actual facebook post from a conservative Christian "friend" on facebook. The disciple of Jesus said without hyperbole that he would have rolled Lockett off the table and yelled, "Next!," a reference to the second planned execution that night, which mercifully did not go forward. How to explain the impulse to torture another human among the tribe of the Prince of Peace.

Evangelical Christianity in the U.S. has failed as an ethic precisely because it borrows its ethical assumptions from another form of life, which is to say it is practicing the grammar of conservative politics but using the vocabulary of Christianity. Jesus has been reduced to a bloody and battered savior, because if he were an ethical or anthropological model, he would challenge the prevailing ethical assumptions of the conservatives who pretend to practice Christianity, but who, in fact, practice American civil religion as informed by conservative politics post Reagan. His words are filtered through the lens of Pauline nonsense, such that Jesus' clear ethical directives in the Sermon on the Mount only serve as some sort of perverse framework that is meant to reveal our need for grace, and not, as seems more obvious, as markers for genuine Christianity. Far easier, after all, to kill our enemies than love them.

By allowing "the state" to act as the Sword of The Lord (Romans 13), Evangelicals create a fantasy world wherein the state is not a fellow citizen who is tasked with the shitty job of killing other humans, but is, in their mind, a nameless, faceless other who executes Old Testament justice, even as they spare themselves the implications of espousing Old Testament ideals of sin, separation, punishment, and death. "The State" is in fact someone's son or husband or father, and his job is to kill people. And would someone please ask them why "the state" insists on the right to execute citizens? Why is this a good idea? Those conservatives who rail against invasive government extend the most invasive right possible, and they do so with a justification drawn from a text that is thousands of years old, and which contains ethical demands they happily ignore because they have parsed these demands by means of an amazing rubric that allows them their assumptions and their sins while condemning those who sin differently.

Finally, Evangelicals have rejected the only ethical model that actually works within the framework of Christianity: virtue ethics. And it is this rejection that ultimately leads to the utterly incoherent ethic they embrace. The question lurking behind the grammar of virtue ethics is "what kind of person do I want to be?" Evangelicals have become content with executing humans because those humans are "bad people" who "deserve to die." The question of what kind of person gives assent to the death penalty, and who, subsequently, can say "roll him off," is never allowed to shape the conversation. I know what kind of people murderers are; they are murderers. What kind of people do Evangelical Americans want to be?

February 11, 2014

I'm tempted to just dictate the conversation as it occurred in class last night, but I can't resist editorializing a bit, so I'm going to do both, but first this set-up. I love when we're in the middle of a class discussion and one member of a group manages to embarrass the whole group by saying something that the group sort of believe but none would say out loud. That happened last semester when one young intrepid redneck admitted that he wouldn't date outside his race because he doesn't like "black girls. I'm not a racist. I just like white women." The entire "I won't date outside my race" group was squirming at that point. Something similar happened last night.

Once again, the conservative Christians (by this I mean they claim to believe the Bible is true, they are saved, and they at least make a pretense of being good Christians) were trying to convince me that there are good reasons they wouldn't vote for an otherwise qualified atheist to be POTUS. (For the record, there are no rational reasons, and I should point out that this was NOT at a Christian school.) One young woman insisted that she could only vote for someone who believed in a higher power to which the POTUS was subject. Clearly, the Constitution isn't sufficient; one must also swear allegiance to Ahura Mazda, YHWH, Jesus, or Allah as well. (They likely wouldn't vote for a Zoroastrian, though, and I know most wouldn't vote for a Muslim.) Another young woman admitted that she wouldn't vote for an atheist, but that she has no problem with them. "They're the ones going to hell, not me," she explained. After this rather depressing opening salvo, the class's oldest student--likely in his early 60s--weighed in. Dictation to follow. Enjoy.

Old Guy: I'll tell you why I wouldn't vote for him, because you need to believe in God. I can't vote for someone who doesn't believe in God.

Me: So a Hindu would be good. Shiva, Vishnu, Brahma. As long as it's a god?

Old Guy: There is only one God.

Me: So you couldn't vote for a Muslim?

Old Guy: No. I couldn't. My problem is that they don't accept Jesus as the Messiah.

Me: So a Jew is out, too.

Old Guy: No. I could vote for a Jew.

Me: But they don't accept Jesus is the Messiah.

Old Guy: But they believe in the One God.

Me: Then by that reasoning a Muslim must be ok.

Old Guy: I guess that's true.

Me: So atheists are out because they don't believe in any god, but especially because they don't believe in the One God.

Old Guy: There is only one God. And I couldn't vote for an atheist because Satan could just come in and take up his mind.

Me: Just staring.

Old Guy: He wouldn't know how to resist Satan. Satan could control him. That's what I believe.

Me: So, those are your beliefs, ok. But what you're saying is that an otherwise qualified candidate should be excluded because he or she believes the wrong thing? (I was tired of the sexist assumption by this point.)

Old Guy: The Bible says that when the Antichrist is revealed, he will be very competent, a leader even. Leadership isn't enough.

Me: Half the Christians in the world believe the Antichrist was already revealed.

Old Guy: I don't know which Christians you know...

Me: Catholics, Presbyterians, Orthodox, Lutheran, more than half the Christians in the world don't read the Bible the way you do.

Old Guy: Catholics? They're led. They don't even read the Bible.

It just got more depressing. When he dropped the Satan line, you could feel the fight go out of the Christians. Based on the way many of them read the Bible they're sort of obligated to believe in the old nefarious one, but it sure sounds bad in a discussion that is supposed to be about American politics and values. I can't vote for you because Satan will control your mind. Yeah, that sound perfectly reasonable. I'm sure the Catholics were thrilled to know that they're sheep, but he's not, too. It only takes two questiosn to divide a tribe against itself, it seems. Nice way to disguise your prejudices behind theology, and bad theology at that.

I'm more troubled by the implications of the entire group rejecting a qualified atheist based on theological assumptions, though. What about belief uniquely qualifies someone to lead and disqualifies another? It's clear that this is a matter of preference and tribalism. None of them was truly comfortable with more than one degree of difference theologically. In other words, many could vote for a Jewish candidate because they've been taught the Jews are God's chosen people, and according to their theology, the Jews will all come around some day, so, hell, they're practically half-siblings. Muslims have to be included, but the Christians are uncomfortable with it. Once you leave behind the Big Three, they have no problem saying they won't vote for that kind of believer.

When forced to explain why, they are typically at a loss. One student once offered that they needed to know the President was a praying person. Why? What could God possibly say to a President that any sane person wouldn't want verified? What decision should a President make that isn't first vetted by advisors, experts, the American public? What does God have to do with the Oval Office? It's so bizarre and unsettling that I find students react very negatively to the growing realization that their entire preference is a mere prejudice.

Secondary to that was a line the Old Guy used. He's African American, by the way, and that point is finally relevant here. He referred back to the Christian foundations of America. For a black man to make that statement shows the degree to which humans can hold two contradictory truths and even utter them with perfect comfort. That a nation founded with slavery written into its Constitution and built on the back of slave labor is somehow construed to be "Christian" by a descendant of those slaves is a complete categorical breakdown. The selective way Christian is defined to buttress his narrow position vis-a-vis POTUS qualifications would never work if those same Christians were once again discussing the Biblical warrants for race-based slavery.